Of the Street-Sellers of Cigar Lights, or Fuzees.
This is one of the employments to which boys, whom neglect, ill-treatment, destitution, or a vagrant disposition, have driven or lured to a street life, seem to resort to almost as readily as to the offers, “Old your ’os, sir?” “Shall I carry your passel, marm?”
The trifling capital required to enter into the business is one cause of its numbering many followers. The “fuzees,” as I most frequently heard them called, are sold at the “Congreve shops,” and are chiefly German made. At one time, indeed, they were announced as “German tinder.” The wholesale charge is 4½d. per 1000 “lights.” The 1000 lights are apportioned into fifty rows, each of twenty self-igniting matches; and these “rows” are sold in the streets, one or two for ½d., and two, three, or four 1d. It is common enough for a juvenile fuzee-seller to buy only 500; so that 2¼d. supplies his stock in trade.
The boys (for the majority of the street-traders who sell only fuzees, are boys) frequent the approaches to the steam-boat piers, the omnibus stands, and whatever places are resorted to by persons who love to smoke in the open air. Some of these young traders have neither shoes nor stockings, more especially the Irish lads, who are at least half the number, and their apology for a cap fully displays the large red ears, and flat features, which seem to distinguish a class of the Irish children in the streets of London. Some Irish boys hold out their red-tipped fuzees with an appealing look, meant to be plaintive, and say, in a whining tone, “Spend a halfpenny on a poor boy, your honour.” Others offer them, without any appealing look or tone, either in silence, or saying—“Buy a fuzee to light your pipe or cigar, sir; a row of lights for a ½d.”
I met with one Irish boy, of thirteen or fourteen years of age, who was offering fuzees to the persons going to Chalk Farm fair on Easter Tuesday, but the rain kept away many visitors, and the lad could hardly find a customer. He was literally drenched, for his skin, shining with the rain, could be seen about his arms and knees through the slits of his thin corduroy jacket and trowsers, and he wore no shirt.
“It’s oranges I sell in ginral, your honour,” he said, “and it’s on oranges I hopes to be next week, plaze God. But mother—it’s orange-selling she is too—wanted to make a grand show for Aister wake, and tuk the money to do it, and put me on the fuzees. It’s the thruth I’m telling your honour. She thought I might be after making a male’s mate” (meal’s meat) “out of them, intirely; but the sorra a male I’ll make to day if it cost me a fardin, for I haven’t tuk one. I niver remimber any fader; mother and me lives together somehow, glory be to God; but it’s often knowin’ what it is to be hungry we are. I’ve sould fuzees before, when ingans, and nuts, and oranges was dear and not for the poor to buy, but I niver did so bad as to-day. A gintleman once said to me: ‘Here, Pat, yer sowl, you look hungry. Here’s a thirteener for yez; go and get drunk wid it.’ Och, no, your honour, he wasn’t an Irish gintleman; it was afther mocking me he was, God save him.” On my asking the boy if he felt hurt at this mockery, he answered, slily, with all his air of simplicity, “Sure, thin, wasn’t there the shillin’? For it was a shillin’ he gave me, glory be to God. No, I niver heard it called a thirteener before, but mother has. Och, thin, sir, indeed, and it’s could and wet I am. I have a new shirt, as was giv to mother for me by a lady, but I wouldn’t put it on sich a day as this, your honour, sir. I’ll go to mass in it ivery Sunday. I’ve made 6d. a day and sometimes more a sellin’ fuzees, wid luck, God be praised, but the bad wither’s put me out intirely this time.”
The fuzee-sellers frequently offer their wares at the bars of public-houses in the daytime, and sometimes dispose of them to those landlords who sell cigars. From the best information I can command there are now upwards of 200 persons selling fuzees in the streets of the metropolis. But the trade is often collateral. The cigar-seller offers fuzees, play-bill sellers (boys) do so sometimes at the doors of the theatres to persons coming out, the pipe-sellers also carry them; they are sometimes sold along with lucifer matches, and at miscellaneous stalls. It will, I believe, be accurate to state that in the streets there are generally 100 persons subsisting, or endeavouring to subsist, on the sale of fuzees alone. It may be estimated also that each of these traders averages a receipt of 10d. a day (with a profit exceeding 6d.), so that 1300l. is yearly laid out in the streets in this way.
Of the fuzee-selling lads, those who are parentless, or runaway, sleep in the lodging-houses, in the better conducted of which the master or deputy takes charge of the stock of fuzees or lucifer-matches during the night to avert the risk of fire; in others these combustibles are stowed anywhere at the discretion, or indiscretion, of the lodgers.
Of the Street-Sellers of Gutta-Percha Heads.
There are many articles which, having become cheap in the shops, find their way to the street-traders, and after a brief, or comparatively brief, and prosperous trade has been carried on in them, gradually disappear. These are usually things which are grotesque or amusing, but of no utility, and they are supplanted by some more attractive novelty—a main attraction being that it is a novelty.